Google Plans To Give Advertisers More Control Over YouTube Ads After Uproar

It takes a lot to get Google to respond to concerns about their core advertising business. It takes even more for them to take immediate action and promise more changes in the future. Last week, when companies like AT&T, Verizon, the BBC, and others pulled millions of dollars worth of ads that had been running on YouTube, Google took notice and took action. The problem was that ads for these big time advertisers were appearing on videos produced by people spreading clear hate speech or messages of terrorism and these large companies or governments with reputations to uphold felt that Google wasn’t doing enough or giving them enough controls to put a stop to it.

A few days later, Google responded by immediately tightening guidelines on things like hate speech and giving more scrutiny to accounts that try to impersonate legitimate brands. Google also promised to further review its policies on what type of content should even be allowed on YouTube (for instance, should terrorist propaganda be allowed?) and when to remove videos and ban accounts. Additionally, Google has promised to begin developing better controls for advertisers to allow them to make sure their ads don’t run on YouTube videos they find objectionable. They also promised to work on delivering better reporting about where a company’s ads ran so that companies can better avoid videos they do not want to be associated with. Finally, Google promised to work to quicken their response times to help advertisers who have concerns about where their ads are showing.

A lot of these upcoming changes relate to large corporations with massive advertising budgets that support hundreds of concurrent ads. That said, better content filtering, reporting, and handling of concerns will be good for everyone. We’ll certainly be keeping an eye out for these changes!